Built 1899 as a shophouse, converted to museum use in 2014-15

One of the last surviving Somali Cafes in Cable Street. During our research we
uncovered a series of Artist, Photographers and Histories who have been
documenting Ali's Cafe, and one of them was Christian Petersen. We contacted
Petersen for him to make this work available to us for our Take Me to Rio
exhibition and series of community dialogue events and heritage walks in 2015,
and this image is from that exhibition.

An extract is found below: "Ali’s Place is a gathering place, a hang out or
den for Ali’s friends to come and chew qat but also for people who are lonely
in the community or just fancy coming in for the banter. The building is a
tall Victorian warehouse, it cost next to nothing I was told. In the 50’s when
Ali arrived in the UK this part of London, Tower Hamlets, was bustling. The
area around Cable Street was home to pubs, nightclubs, brothels, drinking dens
and cheap dockside cafes. Ali had a cafe that served the Yemeni and Somali
sailors in the area and eventually he raised the money to buy ‘Ali’s Place’.
Everyday a group of people, his friends, arrive in the afternoon. The TV
flickers all day until about 8pm when the place closes up. Here you will find
Yemenis, Somalis, Ethiopians, Iranians, Libyans, many are regulars, if they
don’t show one night then there is concern amongst the regulars. Everyone
helps one another out. One day we went to visit one of the older Yemeni men in
the hospital in Whitechapel. He’d gone into theatre and his wife was sat alone
in a corridor on a chair by a oblong window that looked over London. I later
found out he’d had to have his leg taken off below the knee. They talked about
him later that day at Ali’s. He was happy they said."